Amis Poetry Analysis

Davie has known the relevance of Amis’ poetry with the political issue of the period after Second World War and in this connection he says: “ Amis’ poetry, however, is much to our purpose, since for more than his novels it concerns itself quite explicitly with political issues. It does so not under Hardyesque but rather under Gravesian auspices…”( Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry 358 ).

Amis also befriended Jennings at Oxford and for a time became her literary mentor, though she was hardly an ironist in vein of Amis, Wain and Larkin. They were all composing poems at the time. One of the poems, Retrospect seems to have influenced Jennings’s poem Delay for their endings are strikingly similar. Amis’s conclusion: “And love is always moving

“Against Romanticism” presents Amis’s disavowal of romanticism and is one of the Movement’s most enduring poems, fixes its credo in both positive and negative terms. He explains the growth of romanticism but he makes no choice between its forceful principles and the dilemma it poses for adherents unable to harness its force. He contrasts those misled by prophesies and vision with the pragmatic, those governed by rule and reason. Amis further mocks romantic doctrine in Ode to the East- North- East-by- East Wind. Amis’s wind: “a cheery chap I can’t avoid,” a “sweating, empty handed labourer,” a mailles courier” (Amis, Collected Poems 54) seems more real than Shelley’s and he addresses it, not as a supplicant but with reproof. The virtue … of the anti-romantic view of life” is that it expresses itself in ways which appeal to humor as well as reason. “Something Nasty in a Bookshop” is another poem that help Amis establish as one of the Movement’s chief critics of

Enright issued Poets of the 1950s which was to prove one of the most important volumes in the history of the Movement. Prior to the book’s publication, Movement poets had supported one another’s work individually and written complimentary review, but the poets had not been collected in a single anthology. While Enright’s itinerancy were at odds with the Movement’s traditional precepts for e.g. not travelling abroad but if Enright had not travelled to Japan he would not have issued this anthology. Enright compiled Poets of the 1950s for his Japanese students to acquaint them with the new commonsense poetry that was being written in postwar England, “the poetry of civility, passion and order. Enright’s friendship with Conquest was instrumental in shaping the volume. He and his wife had stayed overnight at Conquest’s house in Hampstead, and Enright dedicated his poem Frankenstein to him. In return Conquest, as one of the coeditors of the 1953 P.E.N anthology, included Enright’s work alongside his own and that of Kingsley Amis and Jennings. When Enright asked Conquest for advice on what writers Poets of the 1950s should contain, Conquest recommended the nine Movement poets. Enright had prepared a roaster himself, and his preferences were identical to Conquest’s except for Thom Gunn, whose work he had not read. Enright and Conquest were in almost total agreement, Enright stuck with original selections, and